When last I talked about this, I had done all the theory stuff I was going to be able to do, and done as much as I could with target dummies to optimize my rotation and pet selection. This is all a part of my plan.

So right now I’ve completed step 7, and am suitably impressed at the difference it makes. This was a Troll Heroic, with guildies, but of course not raid buffed. The difference between Survival and BM using my current gear is on the order of 3-4K DPS.

Step 8 – raiding – may add another 1-2K.

So, yeah. This is looking very good for single-target fights.

The next question will be, if it looks good in raids, what will it look like when I gem, gear3, and re-forge again to maximize my damage output?

And the final question will be, will my SV build be viable in that situation (aside from gear, which can be swapped out).

The final question is a big one. I want to be able to keep SV viable as an AoE spec for fights like Magmaw and Cho and whatever 4.2 brings with it. If I have to gimp it too badly to maximize BM, I have to decide if I should gimp BM just enough to make a difference for SV.

So, sometime after our next raid, I’ll have enough data to make a solid decision. Until then, the plan is to keep practicing this spec daily until I am comfortable with all of my shots and cool-downs.

Further bulletins as events warrant.

Actually, not doing that yet, just in case I need to revive Survival. [↩]

This entry was posted on Monday, June 27th, 2011 at 12:44 pm and is filed under How to huntard, Hunter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

I was pondering a follow-up post, but, in short, not as well as I expected. I think a major part of the problem is that I followed Mr Robot’s advice on gemming, instead of Frostheim’s. When I ran ZG earlier and was seeing really good numbers, I was still gemmed for SV (aka the Frost build). So I spent post-raid time last night re-gemming back to the SV build. We’ll see how that works out.

I DID love the new “assist” mode for pets, especially on Mags, but, really, any fight where there was target switching.

Atramedes was bad during air phase simce my nuke requires an airborne pet in order to work, but even then I doubt a wyvern or flying snake would go up there. Fights like Atramedes make me wish I could have a third spec and bring MM along for the ride.

Keep working at it, and I am sure that it will come. I don’t think the flying pets help on air phases, and I think you are right that on air phase fights, you may want to run a second spec. And Survival single-target damage should be pretty decent after the buff to Black Arrow. Until they nerf Survival’s aoe, I will keep it as my second spec.